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At the Vancouver Games, a strong candidate to make the podium, she fell three times during her train-wreck of a free skate program, finishing a disastrous 16th. As the music ended, she covered her face, mortified.

Four years earlier, in Turin, a 19-year-old Kostner had been pushed forward as her nation’s personification of the Games, its flag-bearer at the opening ceremonies. Certainly she was the prettiest, her gorgeous costumes designed by Roberto Cavalli. But she stumbled to ninth where it counted the most and too many Italians took her failure personally. Thankfully, those were in the innocent days before social media. She would have been crucified. Traditional media had her for lunch, though, like prosciutto on a panini.

Now, at age 31, the tall and willowy Italian is an anomaly in a sport where five of the last six Olympic women singles champions have been under 20. Alina Zagitova, leader after Wednesday’s short program segment, was barely seven months old when Kostner debuted at Europeans, a competition she’s won five times.

There have been far more smiles than tears across a career spanning 15 years: bronze in Sochi, with a sultry performance to “Bolero,” a world title in 2012. It’s easy to forget the triumphs.

What stays front of mind is the fateful split-second decision Kostner made, on a July day in 2012, at her house in Germany, a home she shared with then-boyfriend, fellow-Italian Alex Schwazer, an Olympic race walker who’d struck 50-kilometre gold in Beijing. That afternoon, inspectors from the World Anti-Doping Agency came knocking at their door, looking to administer an unannounced drug test against Schwazer.

At his direction, Kostner told the pee-police Schwazer wasn’t home. She lied. But she’s always insisted she didn’t know what she was actually lying about, had been completely unaware of her boyfriend’s long-standing doping — his use of the performance-enhancing drug EPO.

The inspectors eventually caught up with Schwazer, he tested positive and was sent packing from the London Games, banned for three-and-a-half years. He told authorities he’d hidden his drug use from Kostner — actually storing it in her fridge.

“I had just a few seconds to decide what to do,” Kostner told an Italian newspaper later. “I lied on his request but I never — never — covered for him, because I had no idea what he was doing.”

She’d also been questioned by prosecutors about a performance-enhancing hyperbaric chamber in which Schwazer would sleep — not illegal under WADA rules but illegal under Italy’s laws. “He explained that it was to help his breathing,” said Kostner. “I was so happy that he finally came to see me for a couple of days that I wouldn’t have lost time discussing it. Thinking it over, I shouldn’t have had so much trust. But when you see a machine, you don’t associate it with doping.”

It was a far different kind of fall, from grace, for Kostner.

In early 2015, she was handed a 16-month ban after an Italian sports tribunal found her guilty of assisting Schwazer in the coverup. Originally prosecutors had sought a ban of four years to life — more than Schwazer had received for actually doping. “I feel very bitter and disappointed,” Kostner told reporters, vowing to pursue justice at the Court of Arbitration for Sport. No athlete had ever previously been slammed with a ban for the crime of “assisting” and Kostner has never herself tested positive or been suspected of cheating. The Court, in upholding the ban, agreed that she had not been aware of the doping.

Still, she abetted by lying that Schwazer wasn’t home.

Kostner took her punishment, dumped the rat, spent a year skating only in show tours — which was permitted — but refused to go away.

She said, of skating on: “I feel a deep interest in learning what I’ve not learned yet.”

“Ne me quitte pas,” by Céline Dion, is the program she performed Wednesday, with her signature artistry and elegance, but with mistakes, crucially slipping on a triple loop and executing only a triple-double combination where all of the top skaters went triple-triple, finishing sixth. She just doesn’t have the repertoire to keep up with the Russians and Canada’s Kaetlyn Osmond — who sits third, behind Zagitova and Evgenia Medvedeva, with the free skate on Friday. But she’s still a beauty to watch on the ice, a woman among girls.

“It’s not a time to compare yourself to the others because when we’re out there the task we have is to express our personality, our character and our best skating.

“I feel like a woman. I skate in a way now that at 16 I was not able to. I have 15 more years of training and learning and sacrificing.”

She had intended a triple-triple but opted — split-second — to land the back-end double cleanly rather than risk another “Cadolina.”

“It was just not reactive enough to say, who cares, I’m just going to land it. It’s like Formula One, there is an optimal curve you can do but sometimes you just have to react. I’m very happy I did react and that, even after the mistake, I could keep calm, could keep engaged with the music. I felt the connection with the audience.”

She may feel the essence of figure skating deeper inside than any other skater. On the outside, though, she’s a 31-year-old woman in an adolescent’s sport.

“Although I don’t feel old, it’s amazing to be here. Everything that comes to me now is a huge victory. I just want people to see the joy I feel skating.”

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